The OpenCourseWare Consortium invites session proposals for its 2011 global
conference, Celebrating 10 Years of OpenCourseWare. The
OpenCourseWare Consortium is a worldwide community of universities and
organizations committed to advancing OpenCourseWare and its impact on global
education. The OpenCourseWare movement has grown significantly over the last
decade; today there are 13,000 courses published by 150 universities.

We encourage submissions for sessions
that highlight the impact of OpenCourseWare, summarize research, showcase best
practices, discuss issues facing the community, and encourage thinking about
the future of “open” learning. In keeping with the theme of the conference, we
particularly welcome proposals that integrate accounts of OpenCourseWare's
evolution with next steps for the
movement.

In the first quarter of this academic year I was involved with a course on Mobile Service Innovation (SPM9613). The students had to create a mobile service for students. In the last week of the period they had to present it to a jury. The jury consists of a representive of T-mobile, the course manager and me.

Below you can see the different concepts the student groups have presented to us. The winning concept was the group support service

Group support service

bundle of services to support group work of students and staff at TUDelft:

Finding a suitable time where all the members can meet and putting this event in their calendars.

Sending a message to short message to the group

Quickly checking if there are any recent activities instead of having to log in a desktop computer

Quickly checking if new documents have been posted. If there is no need to take immediate action there is no need for a user to log in a desktop computer just to see this.

Panza: Book streaming

Nowadays, when students need a book for a course they are following, they have three options: buying the book, borrowing it from a friend or going to the library. Buying a book would cost a lot of money. If they want to borrow it from a friend, he actually has to have it, and if they go to the library, the book might be unavailable.Recent years have seen the upcoming of the digital book (Kindle, eReader, iBook…). Nevertheless, the prices of the digital books are still relatively expensive. Anyway, Amazon managed to sell this year more digital books than paper books. We would like to develop a book streaming platform in the university environment to mobile devices (laptops, readers, tablets,…) inspired by music streaming platforms as Spotify, Pandora or GrooveShark. The platform would include study books, lecture notes, slideshows, podcast video and audio. Additionally, it would include library services and would offer 2.0 communication where the teacher will be able to add information.

University position service

In TU Delft, students have to spend some time and energy to find a specific location in an unfamiliar faculty building or even a building itself, especially for new students. Sometimes when we find the destination, we find out that it has been used for other purpose or it is closed at that moment accidentally.To resolve those problems, it is necessary to develop a mobile service model to provide functions of campus map (including the location of each building, precise map in each building and end-to-end route), real time information of each room in each building. We also want to incorporate timetable which will be linked to campus map function and group video/voice meeting into the model.

Fundle: Lecture feedback service

A mobile application with which you can rate lectures and teachers would be a simple and easy to use way to give feedback on lectures. This will boost the quality of teaching at TU Delft because there will be an incentive for teachers with bad classes or ratings to act on this. This complements the end of course surveys.This solution is mobile-dependent because of the need to make sure that only student who attended the lecture can rate it, and to make it easy and natural to give feedback.

About Sugata MitraIntrigued by how children might learn without being conventionally taught, Mitra 11 years ago conducted a first experiment: He ordered a hole cut in the wall of the New Delhi office of NIIT, an international IT training company where he headed research and development. In the opening, he put a high-speed computer with Internet access, and he waited. Within hours, curious children from the nearby slum had begun flocking to the machine, exploring it and figuring out which actions yielded results.

In the days and weeks that followed, and in subsequent experiments, the most advanced computer users among the curious kids taught their siblings and friends what they knew, and those children taught more children. They learned to browse the Internet, create documents, play games, and paint pictures. They used the computer's programs to learn words in English, assemble virtual dinosaur skeletons, and listen to stories aloud. The children, ages 8-13, developed their own vocabulary for the task, calling the cursor image a needle and folders cupboards. Mitra describes the process as "minimally invasive education."

Ever since, about 600 ‘holes in the wall’ have been created across India, Africa, and Asia.

Sugata Mitra is currently leading a research project at the NewCastle University in UK, where he is applying similar concepts of self organising learning systems in regular schools.